Lisa Daly Photos
Chan recording her story.
The first time Rachel Alderman stepped into a recording booth, took a deep breath, and thought about how the telephone had influenced her life, she worried that she might not have enough to say. She ended up having plenty of stories to record. And luckily, there are plenty of New Haveners to jump on the mic with her.
Alderman, a producer with A Broken Umbrella Theatre, is one of several Broken Umbrella ensemble members participating in The Exchange, a 10-month storytelling collaboration with Baobab Tree Studios, the New Haven Story Project and the New Haven Museum.
Broken Umbrella and Baobab are inviting New Haveners to come tell their “switchboard” stories as part of the project.
The switchboard — a.k.a. the first commercial telephone exchange—was invented here in New Haven in 1878. A work based on the stories collected will be performed in October of this year, in partnership with City Wide Open Studios.
The work spans two centuries, seeking to bridge the world of nineteenth and twenty-first century New Haven right where the telephone exchange started, at the corner of Chapel and State Streets. After a kickoff at Baobab Tree Studios last week, Alderman said, the project is off to a robust start. Next, she and Broken Umbrella project leaders Jessica Mack and Charlie Alexander are hoping to take to every ward and neighborhood of the city, using a flat-bed truck as a “mobile recording studio” that will ultimately double as the play’s main stage.
“It was a little bit intimidating, but once we kind of kicked it off and found the rhythm, all these beautiful stories came out,” she said. “Right now, the action of dialogue, just exchanging a story, is very powerful. There are all these ways in which we got separated and siloed right now … so to look into someone’s eyes and just share a story, that action is really important to us.”
“We thought about this almost two summers ago,” she added, “But it seems destined that it’s coming to fruition right now.”
The Boardman Building, site of the first telephone exchange.
That is, she specified, at a moment when she’s not hearing a lot of dialogue across the proverbial aisle, much less the phone lines that criss-cross the country in a network of wires. At the kickoff, Mack and Alexander said the same as participants rolled into the studio, laying out what they saw as the project’s central question.
“[What is] the definition of Exchange?,” Mack had asked at the event. “What is equal, what is equitable exchange? And when we exchange, when an exchange happens — What is gained? What is lost?”
And then the evening was off. Alderman interviewed Yale-China Fellow Onnie Chan, an artist who is in New Haven for the year, and uses the phone to connect with her family back at home. There’s something deeply universal in that kind of story-sharing, she said.
Mack, DeLauro and Alexander.
“One of the very first phone numbers i ever learned was my grandparents in Queens,” she said. “I don’t know anybody’s telephone number anymore, but I still know theirs. It was a heartbeat … a lifeline. My grandmother has been dead for 17 years, and there are times when something will happen, and I’ll still get my phone out and start to dial that number. It connects you with the people that you love and miss. It’s such a deep relationship.”
The Exchange is looking for participants! Broken Umbrella members write: As story collecting will be ongoing, interested people are encouraged to reach out to Aric Isaacs at aric@abrokenumbrella.org to participate and share your story. Become part of the exchange.